Short abstract:

This paper examines the political implications of the assetisation of knowledge by tracing how activists’ attempts to enrol investors in raising farm animal welfare standards in agribusinesses produce new ‘assetised’ animal welfare knowledges reflecting the concerns of major financial institutions.

Long abstract:

As agribusiness corporations’ growing prominence within the global meat and dairy industry intersects with a turn to sustainable and responsible investment practices, financial institutions increasingly engage with the environmental and ethical issues surrounding livestock agriculture. Animal welfare activists have responded by introducing new forms of company-level data, performance metrics and benchmarking techniques, which they employ to enrol investors in campaigns to raise animal welfare standards within agribusinesses.

This paper explores how these knowledge production technologies make concern for farm animal welfare circulate within financial markets, drawing upon interviews with representatives of campaigning NGOs, responsible investment networks, ESG research firms and financial institutions. Through tracing the evolution of animal welfare performance benchmarking, I will show that activists’ attempts to enrol different groups of financial institutions in their investor engagements have called forth contrasting ways of conceptualising and measuring farm animal welfare over time. Through tracing how this process has reconfigured knowledges of animal welfare, I will argue that farm animal welfare is being transformed from an ethico-political concern into a driver of systemic financial risks such as antimicrobial resistance as activists shift their focus from specialist ethical investment firms to large mainstream asset managers. Animal activism’s attempts to embed itself into capital markets are thus refashioning the concept of animal welfare itself to reflect major asset owners’ concerns and preoccupations (or ‘assetising’ it). This illustrates the importance of exploring what implications the assetisation of knowledge holds for the conduct and content of politics and activism under asset manager capitalism.